At 10 p.m. on Dec. 31, when Yulia Kash and her husband, Sergei, had just
started boiling potatoes and frying chicken for New Year's dinner in their
apartment in St. Petersburg's Kalininsky District, the electricity went off.

With the electricity went their electric stove, telephone, telephone, tape
recorder and, for some reason, their cold water. The darkened windows in
neighboring apartment buildings signaled that the family was not alone in facing
a "romantic" New Year's celebration.

"Thank God that one of my students gave me a candle as a gift the day
before, and that I had already boiled the beetroot," said Kash, a
28-year-old French teacher. "We managed to make a beetroot salad with
garlic and mayonnaise."

"Pickles and champagne also helped," she added.

Kash and her husband were not the only ones to celebrate the arrival of the
New Year in almost complete darkness; thousands of other residents of St.
Petersburg and the Leningrad Oblast, hit by temperatures down to minus 35
degrees Celsius, did likewise.

An unusually long and deep cold snap that enveloped much of Russia over the
last three weeks has created a number of emergencies in the Northwest Region, as
temperatures dipped as low as -39 C.

As of Thursday, at least 166 buildings in the Leningrad Oblast were still
without heat.

The below-freezing temperatures on the streets generated their own crisis,
with Interfax reporting that two St. Petersburg residents had died from
hypothermia. While it could not confirm the deaths, the city administration's
Health Committee said at least 341 people had been treated for frostbite and
hypothermia in St. Petersburg between Dec. 31 and Jan. 7.

According to the committee, about 220 of those treated were drunk. But
Vladimir Kotsur, chief doctor of the St. Petersburg Scientific Research
Institute for Ambulance Services, said 95 percent of the cases involved drunk
people.

"There is no problem with frosts hurting people, but there is a problem
with the stupid drunken mentality," Kotsur said. "Sober people are
rarely seriously injured by the frost, unless they are injured, because they can
control the situation."

"Every year, we are faced with situations in which we have to amputate
people's extremities after they have suffered from hypothermia brought on while
out drunk in very cold weather," he added. "They are left as invalids
who receive a state pension. In my opinion, people who suffer hypothermia while
they are completely drunk outside should pay for their hospitalization from
their own pockets. Only then are they likely to stop behaving that way."

While large numbers suffered outside, for many, being indoors was not much
better. Particularly badly hit was Tikhvin, in the Leningrad Oblast, where 62
buildings lost all heating last Friday. By Thursday, emergency repair workers
had restored heat in at least 15 buildings. The remaining 47, housing some
13,000 people, including 4,500 children, still had no central heating as of
Thursday.

Residents of another 62 buildings in the villages of Sverdlov and Krasnaya
Zvezda, near Vsevolozhsk, also in the Leningrad Oblast, lost their heating on
New Year's Eve. Twenty six of the buildings were still without heat on Thursday.

According to the press service of the Northwest Region branch of the
Emergency Situations Ministry, most of the shutdowns were the result of
electricity failures brought on by the cold.

Valentin Shumovsky, the head of the press service at local power utility
Lenenergo, said many electrical problems arose because the system cannot handle
all the electric heaters switched on when the temperature dips.

"The problem is that the electricity systems in most Russian buildings
were built to certain specifications that limit the consumption of electricity
by any one apartment," Shumovsky said. "Many apartments are wired to
receive no more than 5 kilowatts, while one modern electric radiator alone can
exceed that."

He added that, when the levels are exceeded, transformers in the buildings
switch off automatically, to prevent wires overheating and causing fires.

"In this situation, people who switch on several electric radiators at
once in their apartments should be aware that, in the end, they might cause
problems for the whole apartment building," Shumovsky said.

He also said that the city's electric and heating networks are simply not
equipped to deal with temperatures below -25 C and that, at a
city-administration meeting on Wednesday, the discussion centered around a
program for reconstructing the networks.

One of the hardest hit areas in the Northeast Region was Karelia, which saw
temperatures drop as low as -45 C and the heating fail in 265 buildings, home to
5,300 people. Sixteen schools, four kindergartens, four hospitals, and one
orphanage were left in the cold, Interfax reported.

Karelia President Sergei Katanandov, in a conversation with President
Vladimir Putin broadcast on Channel One, said some outages were the result of
carelessness on the part of utility workers. He said that a heating breakdown in
the town of Muyezerskoye was in part caused by holiday celebrations. The
electricity was accidentally switched off at 11:55 p.m. on Dec. 31, as outside
temperatures dropped to -45 C. As a result, water froze in the town's pipes,
which subsequently burst.

"Clearly, people were celebrating," Katanandov told Putin.
"They relaxed a bit, and let this happen."

The cold snap left a number of public institutions scrambling to get by and
avoid further disasters. Halfway between Moscow and St. Petersburg, in the
Novgorod region town of Valdai, 24 apartment blocks and a hospital were without
heat after pipes burst, leaving more than 3,000 people in the cold. Novgorod's
Emergency Situations Department was unable to turn the heating back on by the
end of Wednesday, as it previously promised, media reported. Television showed
newborn children surrounded by hot water bottles in the local hospital.

Employees at the St. Petersburg Botanical Gardens resorted to lighting fires
to warm up the fragile plants in the gardens' greenhouses. Utilities workers
were able to restore power at the gardens on Monday, after it had been out for
just over a day, Interfax reported.

On Thursday, Leningrad Oblast Governor Valery Serdyukov approved the
allocation of 2 million rubles ($62,500) for emergency repairs in Tikhvin, and
2,000 rubles ($62) in compensation to each family that suffered from
central-heating-system failures in the Leningrad Oblast. The State Construction
Committee has allocated another 3 million rubles ($94,000) for work in Tikhvin.

Thursday brought relatively warm weather in St. Petersburg, with temperatures
rising to -3 C, but forecasters do not expect it to last. According to the
city's Meteorological Center, temperatures are set to drop as low as -18C Friday
and continue falling Saturday - to as low as -28 C. Temperatures in the north of
the Leningrad Oblast are expected to fall to as low as -37 C on the same day.

While experts at the center said that temperatures this low are not rare for
the region - 1987, 1978 and 1942 brought much lower readings - the length of the
current cold spell is unusual. Not since the winter of 1940 to 1941, when the
deep cold brought misery, as well as food - across frozen Lake Ladoga - to
Leningrad, then suffering under a Nazi-German blockade, has the city endured
such a prolonged and severe cold period.

The meteorologists said that the cold spell is being caused by fronts of warm
air that usually come in from over the Atlantic Ocean swinging south of the
Northwest Region this year, leaving cold air from the Arctic unchallenged.

The center says that the next cold spell will begin to relax on Wednesday,
with temperatures climbing to between -8 C and -10 C and likely remaining in
that range for the rest of the month.